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Thursday, September 11, 2014

ISIS Is Not Islamic? by Daniel Pipes

In a televised address
this evening, President Barack Obama outlined his ideas on how to
defeat the Islamic State. Along the way, he declared the organization
variously known as ISIS or ISIL to be "not Islamic."
In making this preposterous claim, Obama joins his two immediate predecessors in pronouncing on what is not Islamic. Bill Clinton called the Taliban treatment of women and children "a terrible perversion of Islam." George W. Bush deemed that 9/11 and other acts of violence against innocents "violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith."

None of the three has any basis for such assertions. To state the obvious:
as non-Muslims and politicians, rather than Muslims and scholars, they
are in no position to declare what is Islamic and what is not. As Bernard Lewis,
a leading American authority of Islam, notes: "it is surely
presumptuous for those who are not Muslims to say what is orthodox and
what is heretical in Islam." (That Obama was born and raised a Muslim has no relevance here, for he left the faith and cannot pronounce on it.)
Indeed, Obama compounds his predecessors' errors and goes further:
Clinton and Bush merely described certain actions (treatment of women
and children, acts of violence against innocents) as un-Islamic, but
Obama has dared to declare an entire organization (and quasi-state) to
be "not Islamic."
The only good thing about this idiocy? At least it's better than the formulation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (known as CAIR) which has the nerve to call ISIS "anti-Islamic."
In the end, though, neither U.S. presidents nor Islamist apologists
fool people. Anyone with eyes and ears realizes that ISIS, like the
Taliban and Al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic. And most
Westerners, as indicated by detailed polling in Europe,
do have eyes and ears. Over time, they are increasingly relying on
common sense to conclude that ISIS is indeed profoundly Islamic.